Great Egret @ Forsythe Reserve

[Randall Farhy]

Taken on my last visit to the Forsythe Reserve in Brigantine NJ, October 2012. Canon 7D 400mm F5.6 Handheld. ISO 400 F6.3 1/4000 40% crop. PP: Topaz Denoise5 > LR5 for everything else. Thanks for viewing, critiques appreciated.

[Diane Miller]

The bird looks quite sharp, good shutter speed. The water seems on the dark side -- you could go to the HSL panel in LR and lighten and desaturate the blues a little for comparison. The whites look good -- I'm probably inclined to try to bring out too much detail in them. You might compare lightening the darks and darkening the lights with the Shadows and Highlights sliders, if you haven't already gone that route.

[Randall Farhy]

Diane, thank you for the critique. I will play with it as per suggestions. One of the issues (as I'm sure you are aware) when playing with the blue channel is that it also affects the white brightness/saturation of a reflected sky surface, in this case the bird. White detail is always a concern with Egrets and I'm just learning how to recover, or pull it out in an image while trying to maintain a more natural appearance. Something else wrt this image-the amount of noise reduction was unusually high for an ISO 400 exposure-due in part to deliberate under exposure to keep some of the whites from blowing out, and that it was shot on a 7D-which seems to have a higher blue noise signature. Because of this, some detail was smoothed over. In hindsight, I may have been able to get away with a lower setting (start point was 14 on Denoise5) and retain just a tad more detail on the bird.

[eddyswan]

Great flight pose and i love the water color, it makes the bird stands out. I see lack of details at upper left wing and the back behind the neck.

[Diane Miller]

If you're using ACR in CS6 or later or LR4 or later (Process 2012, with the Shadows and Highlights sliders), pulling the highlight slider left will often bring more detail into the whites, and then in PS using the Nik CEP Detail Extractor can add another level of highlight (and shadow) detail. But it will also emphasize noise. Using the Shadows slider would lighten the water, but will bring out noise.

I don't know Denoise, but Nik's Dfine and Neat Image can often do a very good job on noise, often without softening detail in the subject.

Noise and sharpness are hard to deal with after the fact, even in a RAW file.

[Randall Farhy]

Thanks again Diane, I'll have to look into NIK CEP. I've been using a workflow that doesn't utilize ACR, my file storage and random movements wreak havoc with sidecar attachments-far more comfortable batching RAW's to zero in DPP and creating TIF file to work from. Exports

from Lightroom are also saved in TIF format, this way I have a "hard copy" of everything. I realize this can create long chains and use up more storage, but it's how I got started and have become accustomed to it. Is there any visual advantage to using LR5 ACR vs using LR5

on a Zeroed TIF file? (I usually apply Noise reduction as the first step unless major exposure adjustments are required, then I will do those first then reduce noise.)

[Diane Miller]

"Is there any visual advantage to using LR5 ACR vs using LR5" I don't understand the Q here. LR5's Develop module and ACR that accompanies PS CS6 are the same engine with different interfaces. Both work equally well. But if you use that on a TIFF it's like a JPEG -- you already have the tonalities glued in. Working on a RAW file you have much more leeway. And you can batch process easily, only everything is non-destructive until you rasterize a file going to PS. I often can do everything in LR (or ACR) and have less and less need of PS in many cases.

Some people are strong advocates of DPP but I rarely have noise issues with correct exposure, and LR gives me such powerful image organizing ability, and round-trips to PS so well, I couldn't live without it. And the new "Process 2012" sliders have an amazing ability to recover shadow and highlight detail.

And traveling with a laptop then bringing files back to the mother ship is so easy with LR.

There are some LR tutorials on my web site -- they are for LR3 but apply equally to LR5 for everything but the Develop module, which is now greatly improved.

[Randall Farhy]

OK, went back and boosted blue luminance +38, adjusted white point and highlight slider lower to compensate for the brighter whites and draw out a little bit more detail on the bird. While I feel this helps, the egret is at the point where it's starting to look a little grey with the overall image flattening out a bit.

[Diane Miller]

Stacking the two and clicking back and forth, the egret is now (for me) a little to detailed on the body, but better on the wings. I'd probably mask in the wings on the original body.

The water looks even darker, though. It isn't very successful done on the JPEG but here's an approximation with the water lighter, just for comparison. I did a coarse mask on the bird with the Quick Selection tool, inverted it and did a Curves adjustment layer, bringing the black point straight up and the white point straight left a little, but I left a straight line. Just a quick and dirty way to lower contrast and lighten it -- maybe just pulling up the midpoint of the curve would have been better. At any rate, it's better done on the RAW file with the Shadows and HSL adjustments.

I should have masked off the feet, though -- was in a hurry.

[Sandy Witvoet]

Stunning Randall! Agree that the water on the OP was a bit too dark. (It had also put a dark "line" on the underside of the bird's neck and body). I think Diane has done a great job of recovering details in both the whites and the dark areas of the Egret. I'm good with the legs. (I did the same thing with the water on my young Loon post a few months back...looked dramatic at first glance, but Diane and a few others helped bring me back to reality!)
Super BIF!